Facebook returns to full service, blames DNS update for downtime

Update: Facebook is back up. The company provided TNW with the following note on what went wrong from a technical perspective:

Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Facebook has been encountering some DNS issues this afternoon that are making it unavailable to many users globally. The social network’s Domain Name System servers are not directing folks to its site, causing it to appear as if the network is down completely.

As of this writing, Facebook’s been down for some 30 minutes at the very least, and plenty of people are pretty upset.

Luckily for them, it appears that visiting various Facebook subdomains, including o.facebook.com and beta.facebook.com, allows users to access Facebook, proving this is a DNS issue.

This is Facebook’s first major outage since October 11, when the social network went down in several countries worldwide. At the time, there were rumors that the site had been hacked, but Facebook denied this, and instead blamed DNS test for its European outage, which lasted more than an hour.

Earlier today, a number of Google services went down as well, including Gmail. This, of course, led to similar results: angry tweets and inconvenienced users.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and we’ll update this post when we hear more.